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I've heard a lot of screaming about how bad and ugly windows 8 / 2012 server is but honestly it's really not so bad.

The only really ugly thing is Metro… I understand what MS tried to do with that… They tried to make an uniformed experience over the whole MS ecosystem reaching from phones to server which isn’t such a bad idea but no… Metro on production desktops and on servers is a pain in the a$$. It should at least be possible to “opt out” from boot to Metro without third party tools.

The system itself is more and more optimized. Windows 8 turns like a charm on an 8 year old desktop.

What people mostly oversee are the incredible capacities of the 2012 and 2012R2 servers. I work with 2012 server since it came out and took a closer look on 2012R2 and there is one thing I can tell you… It’s good… Really good. The functions that got the most attention from MS are HYPER-V (Nothing to do with what you find on 2008R2), Storage Spaces and SMB3. With 2012 you could already build a solid virtualization farm but now… With the improvements in Storage Spaces you can also totally forget the hassle about SANs and their dedicated infrastructure. Combine this with SCVMM 2012 and you have a complete end to end cloud solution

It would be stupid to change a working and existing infrastructure. But for those planning to renew their server infrastructure and want to go far beyond “simple” consolidation by virtualization it’s really interesting.

If you’re interested you can look here… It’s a bit long but really well explained

People use computers to be productive, servers are for business users.

I do not disagree with you... I also said that:

Metro on production desktops and on servers is a pain in the a$$. It should at least be possible to “opt out” from boot to Metro without third party tools.

You have to be able to use it to be productive.

You can... But there are 3 major problems before you're able to:

- You must configure the UI like hell before it's usable
- You need third party tools to circumvent Metro
- You can’t make these tweeks through GPOs (or only through registry keys)

This is not a problem for servers... You just have to get used to the interface and that's it (There are even some nice tools in the interface I would really miss now), but for the productive workplace this is a "no go".

Users are simply not able to make such radical changes... I work with this on a daily basis and it took me literally weeks to get used to it and become really productive (again)